The Master List

How this list can be used

This list of unique-nouns in Mahabharata can be used as a dictionary of nouns found in Mahabharata

It can also be used as an encyclopedia of all the nouns in Mahabharata

Each noun is further analyzed by compiling all the instances of the noun in the entire Mahabharata. My plan is to dedicate a page for each of the noun. Hence this list can be used as a starting point for further analysis

The number of occurances of each noun in each book (Parva) of Mahabharata is a kind of spectral signature of the noun in the whole of Mahabharata. This spectral signatures are useful to understand the layered structure of Mahabharata; it will lead one to analyse how the text of Mahabharata accumulated over time layer after layer

By analyzing the nouns further and classifying them into groups, one will be able to establish relationships between the nouns, which will lead to discovery of new patterns and theories about Mahabharata, and about the culture and people that generated this literature and this will generate tremendous insight into the pre-history of that ancient human population that created this epic

Further steps

Plan is to study other Sanskrit texts like the Ramayana and the Vedas using the experience generated by studying the Mahabharata and expand the horizons of knowledge by comparative analysis of all texts.

The study is to be extended to Tamil, Greek, Roman, Iranian and Central Asian literature also

More graphs, charts, list and tables related to the analysis are planned to be generated

Improvements

There are following improvements in the current version from the previous version:-

Dual words connected with hyphen like Deva-vrata are recognized as a single word

The problem of ignoring apostrophe is now fixed. So Arjuna's will now be recognized separately from Arjunas

The preface and footnotes are removed from the source text so they won't interfere with the statistics

Ganguli's and other translators translation errors still remain unfixed

However some words like Friday are removed manually

Some words like Mars, Pluto etc are retained since they are kept as translation of original Sanskrit words like Angaraka and Yama

Known Limitations (of Version 1.0)

The following are the known limitations of this list:-

Ganguli's translation of Mahabharata into English, especially the version available in internet contains some typo errors, though not frequent which result in same noun with different spelling. Example is Drona and Dorna. This will result in the noun Dorna counted as distinct from the noun Drona. By familiarity or by further analysis-steps the statistics for these nouns can be combined. I have not bothered to write algorithm in the software to combine such statistics yet

Since most of the nouns has a Sanskrit origin, some nouns will translate with different spelling when written in English. Example is Phalguna and Falguna. This also result in similar issues as mentioned above

I have subjected the entire raw text of Mahabharata to software analysis without removing footnotes or prefaces, to combine existing knowledge of some nouns with the nouns themselves. So in rare occasions, nouns belonging to footnote and prefaces get counted. But all the nouns which only exist in the foot note and preface and never in the main text are deleted.

Some times translator (Ganguli) opted to use words familiar to current era to represent the words mentioned in this ancient epic. So some plant names appear in their scientific names. So do not get surprised to see some odd looking botanical names in the list. Similarly the translator has used Roman names of the planets like Mercury, Mars etc to translate Sanskrit names of the planets like Vudha and Angaraka. So these Roman names also appear in the list. Similarly translator has tried to correlate Roman / Greek gods with epic personalities with characteristics similar to them. An example is translation of the noun Yama to Pluto! One strange incidence of translation is the use of the noun 'Friday'. All these strange instances can be understood as the result of translation from the original Sanskrit text.

The words separated by a hyphen are counted as different words not one. In some cases like Kuru-panchala or Sindhu-sauvira this works fine while in some cases this result in treating a single noun as two. Examples are Dalvya-vaka. Pancha-noda etc

Apostrophes are ignored. Hence Arjuna's become Arjunas

Jijith Nadumuri Ravi
email:moc.liamg|rnhtijij#moc.liamg|rnhtijij

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Created by Jijith Nadumuri at 07 Feb 2010 10:09 and updated at 03 Jun 2010 15:21